


Like a Memory It Falls

by Scribe



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Author's Favorite, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-22
Updated: 2010-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-11 05:14:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU after season 1: in which the rain Merlin summoned and cannot stop threatens to destroy Camelot. Or, from another angle, a story about grief and new beginnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Memory It Falls

**Author's Note:**

> Many many thanks to vensre and fiercynn for excellent betaing, without which this wouldn't have made any sense at all.
> 
> Title from Kathy's Song by Paul Simon.

Afterward, it rains.

Gaius bears no outward sign of Nimueh's magic but it leaves him feeble, prone to dizzy spells and sudden failures of strength and focus — or perhaps it is just that he is too old for desperate horseback rides, or that life freely relinquished is slow to re-inhabit a body already worn by so many years. Merlin doesn't give much thought to the reason, just keeps a hand free in case Gaius starts listing to one side or the other and points them both toward Camelot. It takes two days.

It's still raining when they return, a steady, soaking downpour that turns earth to muck and the paved courtyard into a slippery mess of dirty rivulets. The guards at the gate glare at them with all the resentment of people who will not be going inside any time soon and Merlin thinks of rusty armor and of Arthur and groans.

To be fair, he has good reasons for tarrying. There's his mother, mostly healed, who has to be greeted and comforted and explained to and then pretends to be angry, although she rather ruins that with the way she keeps reaching out to smooth his hair or touch his shoulder as she scolds. Then there's Gaius to look after. He needs dry clothes and hot tea and medicine and helping to bed, at which point he turns on his pillow and says,

"It's of no matter to me if you decide to perform your actual duties, but if you don't would you please find some other excuse and let me rest?"

Reporting to Arthur can't be as bad as the combination of Gaius's eyebrow and the scolding he can see coming on his mother's face, like he's no more than a child complaining about his chores. Merlin goes.

He's wrong, as it turns out.

"Where have you _been_?" Arthur demands, whirling on him the moment he opens the door. The room is an utter disaster, the way it gets when Merlin is ill and Arthur petulantly won't let anyone else serve him. Clothes and food, mostly, but he thinks he can see the signs of weaponry that really isn't meant to be used indoors. Arthur's arm is out of its sling. It probably shouldn't be, but then no one but Gaius would have dared tell him to keep it there.

"What is so hard for you to understand about this?" Arthur is saying. "You are my servant. You are in my service. You cannot just disappear for days at a time. You cannot go anywhere without asking my permission and you cannot go anywhere if I don't give you that permission and no, some kind of vague and teary goodbye before vanishing from the castle does not count as asking!"

He's pacing a little as he rants, slamming his good hand down on the table for emphasis and rattling the piles of dirty dishes. He's had no trouble asking other servants to bring him food, Merlin notes, which means that refusing to let them clear it away is just to make him look pathetic and to make more work for Merlin later. Of course. Only Arthur would figure out how to be extra-efficient in his bratty prince tantrum. Merlin tunes out the shouting and tries not to fidget. He's utterly exhausted, sore from two days in the (wet) saddle, and the back parts of his hair are dripping slowly down his neck and making his nice new dry clothes cold and damp again. He cares a lot about Arthur, he really does, but in between bouts of heroic life saving he can be, well, kind of annoying.

It keeps raining.

The worried-and-angry-at-being-worried part of Arthur's bad mood goes away, but the stuck-inside-the-castle-with-Uther part just gets worse and worse. At least Merlin can get away at nights, now: there's no question of Hunith taking the journey back to Ealdor, but after the third day she refuses to impose any longer and Gwen insists that it will be good to have someone using her house again and Merlin adds "willful women" to "willful princes" on the list of people he is doomed to spend his life obeying. His mother still comes to meals with them and stays for hours afterward as often as not, which is lovely, but it's equally lovely to have his bed back.

By the time this happens Merlin is already having doubts about the origins of the storm. Storm is perhaps not a good word for it; there is no thunder, no lightning, no natural ebb and increase as the hours wear on. Just rain, the unceasing, unchanging rhythm of it getting under everyone's skin. The sky is solid grey. It gets brighter in the morning and darker at night, but only barely, and they light torches against the dismal twilight of it even at midday. The courtyard turns from a series of streams to a giant puddle. The guards pull every trick they know to get out of watching a road that no one has any desire to travel.

Merlin, at least, has always liked rain. Arthur has always hated it with a passion. The longer he is cooped up inside the more bored and irritable he gets, and he seems determined to make Merlin suffer with him. In one of his less childish moods he decides to teach Merlin to play chess, but gets frustrated in an amount of time that wouldn't be fair even to someone with a head for strategy, which Merlin admittedly does not have. Arthur insults him a little and then wanders off to get appallingly drunk with his knights. Merlin has to wait up for him until some obscene hour of the night and then has to clean vomit off Arthur's trousers and his own shoes, which does not improve his mood even a little bit.

It's an effort to drag himself up to Arthur's chambers the next morning. He half-expects the day's entertainment to be knife-throwing practice at close quarters, but it appears that Arthur's tipped from bored and tetchy to bored and lethargic. He's barely bothered to get dressed, just trousers and shirtsleeves, and he's lying on top of the bedclothes, staring at the ceiling. Must be chilly, Merlin thinks, noting the draft as soon as he steps into the room. He should probably disapprove of the open window, but at this point even cold and damp is preferable to stale and stuffy, so he just places Arthur's breakfast on the table and goes to lay a fire. Arthur doesn't stir as he moves about the room.

Merlin even dares to dream about escaping for the morning, but just as he makes it to the door there is a (slightly over-dramatic) sigh from behind him.

"Sit down," says Arthur. Merlin turns. Arthur taps one bare foot on the covers in a pointed fashion, so he goes and sits on the edge of the bed. It's a very comfortable bed but he's not very comfortable on it, staring at the wall and too aware of Arthur sprawled behind him. The open window makes the rain sound ten times louder.

"I think the rain's getting heavier," he says, not even fooling himself. Arthur just kicks him in the thigh. What everyone knows and isn't saying is this: in the natural world it doesn't rain at the _exact same intensity_ for days at a time. What Merlin knows and isn't saying is this: he is the one who summoned the rain.

"I guess there's nothing for it," says Arthur. "You're going to have to tell me your life story."

"My what?"

"Well, it's not like there's anything else to do."

"I don't have a life story! I mean, not an interesting one. You already know it. I grew up in Ealdor, I came here. That's it."

"Merlin, you are an abysmal storyteller."

"That's just the sort of lives we normal people have. It's not my fault that everything I do isn't a matter of state importance."

"Doesn't mean it's not interesting. Here, tell me about your father. I've never heard a word about him."

"No, neither have I," Merlin snaps, proving that he has not moved quite as far beyond that childhood hurt as he often thinks he has.

Arthur is quiet behind him. The rain pounds down, splashing in the already drenched courtyard.

"I'm sorry," Arthur says eventually. "I thought he must have died, like Will's father. I didn't realize."

Merlin picks at the coverlet, marshalling his thoughts. Ealdor seems a world away. Arthur has been there, of course, but sometimes it still feels like he remembers his childhood in some other language, one that no one in Camelot has ever heard or spoken.

"It wasn't like that, really," he says. "I never knew who he was, but no one ever shunned us or talked behind our backs like you might expect. It was more that they didn't talk at all. There were people in the village who knew, I could tell, but they'd just change the subject whenever I asked about him. Not like it was a shameful subject, just something better left unsaid, you know? Better forgotten."

Arthur makes a noise, a sort of noncommittal hum, and it occurs to him that there's a good chance he's just described Arthur's childhood as well as his own. It's a strange thought.

"And playmates?" Arthur prompts when he's silent for too long. "Were there others your age?"

"Lots. Will's the oldest of six, so they were always following us around." He notes the present tense but refuses to correct himself. "One of my neighbors had three daughters around our age. The middle one was the prettiest girl for miles, we all used to argue over who would marry her one day. Then they had cousins—" he cuts himself off, aware that this can't possibly be interesting.

"Why are we doing my life story?" he asks instead. "I should be able to ask you questions too. Fair's fair."

"If you like," says Arthur. It's unexpected and leaves Merlin floundering, all too aware that the things he wants to know will likely snap Arthur out of his strangely peaceful mood.

"When did you start learning to fight?" he asks, and then immediately berates himself for wasting this opportunity on such a stupid question.

"I don't suppose you'd believe I was actually born waving a sword?"

"Not a chance."

"When I was eight, really. Of course I'd played at fighting for as long as I can remember, but the first time anyone gave me a real weapon and some actual instruction was my eighth birthday."

When Merlin was eight he'd helped with the planting, which wasn't really any different than any other year. It had warmed early that spring and they'd had to hurry to get everything ready in time. The year Merlin was eight was also the year he saved Will's little sister from drowning in the river outside the village. They'd had a favorite tree by the bank and neither of them realized she was too young to climb it too until the moment Merlin plucked her from the water with only a glance and a thought. Will never told a soul.

It's kind of ironic, really, that all that happened in the same year someone started teaching Arthur to kill.

"My turn," says the man himself, now long accustomed to his sword. "Why did you leave Ealdor?"

"To be your loyal and obedient servant, of course," says Merlin. It doesn't come out sounding quite like the joke he'd intended it to be, but Arthur laughs anyway.

By the second week, Merlin is expecting someone in the castle to snap and commit murder. The courtyard has gone from puddle to dirty lake, clogged with downed branches and toppled carts. Inside the sound of the rain is augmented by the slow drip of leaks into scattered bowls and barrels and by a hacking cough that spreads quickly from person to person. Nothing will dry completely. Merlin isn't as careful as he should be and earns a reputation as the only person who can reliably coax a fire out of wet wood.

He tells Arthur that Gaius needs his help making cough remedies and spends most of his time poring over old books, looking for a spell to make it stop raining. There are a lot of warnings about not meddling with the forces of nature and nothing much about what to do if you've already meddled with them. "What about the Afanc?" he says one morning.

"The what?" asks his mother, radiating disapproval from where she's stirring something over the fire. She's taken over the endless rounds of palliatives, leaving Gaius to help Merlin in his search.

"The Afanc. It was a creature that Merlin, er, helped to defeat. It was spreading illness through the water supply."

"Is that so?"

"It was easily dispatched, really," says Gaius hurriedly. "Not dangerous at all."

Merlin suppresses a smile; he doesn't think he'll ever get tired of watching Gaius on the defensive. Maybe his mother will give him lessons.

"The point is, the Afanc was a water creature and we used the other elements to destroy it," he puts in before they get too sidetracked. Hunith throws him a look at 'we', but he ignores it. "Obviously the element of water is out of balance, so maybe we need the other elements to get it back."

"I don't know," says Gaius slowly. "It's certainly an interesting idea."

"Even if it doesn't work, at least you're trying something and not just sitting here waiting for it to get worse," adds his mother.

Merlin wholeheartedly agrees. There's only one problem: it turns out that one of the basic rules of elemental magic is that it can't be done from afar.

It helps that Uther has apparently realized that he can't wait out the storm and has decided to fight it instead. Merlin isn't exactly sure what he has Arthur doing with every spare minute of his day, but at least it keeps him busy. He barely sees the prince, even when Gwen's house floods and he has to start sleeping in Arthur's rooms again so that his mother can have a bed.

It doesn't take much effort to sneak into the forest surrounding Camelot. Uther keeps guards on the main gate but even that is mostly for appearances; no one is watching the myriad other entrances to the castle, and certainly not for someone going out.

They probably have good reason. It's another world outside, and Merlin can't imagine anyone braving it if they didn't have to. Within seconds he's wetter than he's ever been without actually being submerged in a body of water. He leaves his shirt at the edge of the forest, soaked through and completely useless. He'd shuck the rest of his clothing, too, but he's not walking through mud and downed trees and who knows what kind of wildlife without at least some protection.

The downpour obscures his vision, making trees long stripped of their leaves loom strangely and giving him a moment of panic when he turns and realizes that he can barely see the castle. Rushing water knocks debris against his ankles. He can't even hear it, can't hear anything at all over the roaring of the rain. Once he glances down into the murk and thinks of snakes, and then he very pointedly doesn't anymore.

This isn't the kind of rain that he liked to play in as a child, soaked to the skin and laughing as his mother threatened not to care for him if he caught cold from his own silliness. This rain is punishing, uncaring and unstoppable in that terrifying way of nature being so much larger than humans. It feels like unbearable pressure, forcing his head down and weighting his steps, the sound of it turning his thoughts to the desperate things people might do in search of silence.

It gets worse every time he goes out.

His days fall into a routine: get up in the morning, start a fire, fetch Arthur's breakfast and help him dress. Down to Gaius's room for his own breakfast and to collect whatever objects or spells they are pretending to have hope in, then outside to throw magic uselessly into the weight of the rain. Then back to the castle, the blessed stone walls that dull the sound of it, bringing Arthur his supper with his skin still clammy and cold. It doesn't matter. Nothing dries anymore.

He doesn't know how many times he repeats the pattern. Days, surely, but it feels like years, feels like he was born doing this and will do it for all eternity. There is no sense of time in the rain. He wakes up one morning with the eerie sense that he's been living the same day over and over again.

He is able to dismiss the thought, but only barely, and only because this morning for the first time Arthur is awake before him, dressed and standing motionless at the window.

"The refugees will start coming soon," Arthur says.

"Refugees," Merlin repeats. It startles him out of his dream of days, out of magic and rain and back to the wider world where Arthur has been working day and night to save his people.

"The ones who can make it. Even the roads on high ground are starting to wash out and I doubt there's a bridge left in the kingdom. They'll come, though, make no mistake. Whole villages have been washed away. They've got nowhere else to go."

"But Camelot will protect them?"

"It doesn't matter. None of it matters any more. Whatever it is, whatever's doing this, it's won."

_I'm sorry, it was for you,_ Merlin stops at the edge of his tongue, swallows down. "What do you mean?" he asks instead.

"The crops. Our fields are underwater, Merlin, everything's either rotted or washed away. I doubt there's seed for next year, but it won't matter because we're not even going to make it to winter. There won't be a harvest this year, not anywhere in Camelot, and _we have no stores_."

The slam of his fist on the windowsill doesn't even break through the sound of the rain.

"We have no stores," he says again, "because I killed that unicorn." He still doesn't turn around. They stay like that for a long while, Merlin watching Arthur's back and Arthur watching the rain, not in silence because there is no such thing as silence anymore. If guilt could fill bellies, he thinks, the two of us could keep everyone in Camelot alive.

That afternoon he goes to see the dragon.

It makes him wait a long time, but that's better than trying to kill him, so Merlin figures he'll take what he can get. He spells his torch to burn slowly and tries to get comfortable on the cold stone. He'd thought it might be quiet, but even down here the rain makes itself known, seeping down the rock at his back and dripping in thousand-fold echoes from the depths of the cave. From the sound of it there is a raging torrent of a river below him, but he can't muster the courage to look down.

He's ready to shield himself when the dragon finally comes winging down, chain trailing, but it just settles on its usual spire and stares at him. And stares at him.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. This doesn't mean I'm not angry with you and it doesn't mean I trust you, but if you don't help me now I think that all of Camelot is going to die."

It stares some more.

"Look, I don't care if you hate me," he says. "I'll never come down here again. But if you want Arthur to be king, he can't do it if he's dead and he can't do it if he doesn't have a kingdom left to rule. Or haven't you noticed the rain?"

Still nothing.

"I didn't do anything wrong!" he shouts finally, desperate. "A life for a life, I paid the price, Nimueh for Arthur. Not the life you wanted, I know, but I did it. I found another way!"

"A life taken in anger and a life given in love are not the same," rumbles the dragon, "and nature will take the balance that you would not willingly pay. Why do you seek my advice if you will not follow it?"

It hisses, once, and leaves Merlin alone with the rain echoing from every side.

 

He walks straight from the dragon's cave to the forest. He has no spell to chant, nothing to offer, no new way to call on the elements. He simply walks until he cannot see the castle anymore and then he calls up his magic and opens it to the world, forgoes spells and lets what is in his heart make the shape of it, the way he did when the rain began. It's like letting air into a new wound. His magic is secret, fragile, and he can feel the rain beating down on it like he's exposed the inside of his heart. He stumbles, falls, stays on all fours in the river that is the forest floor. It's hard to get a breath that isn't half water. The rain pounding on the back of his neck tells him it would take the strength of a hundred men to raise his head but he does it anyway, lifts his face blind to the sky and says,

"Please."

The word is buried instantly beneath so much sound. He can feel himself speaking but can't hear it, can't hear anything but rain.

"Please," again. "This isn't what I wanted. I paid the price. A life for a life and the life of this land to make the difference, it's enough. Please."

Nothing changes. Nothing left to try. He puts his head down and is already half-gone, letting the rain beat him down into nothingness, when he thinks, _I have to get Arthur his supper._ He gets lost on the way back to the castle.

 

When he wakes shivering in his own bed, a full day has passed and the first of the refugees have arrived.

"You just appeared at the door, half-drowned," his mother says, watching him devour a piece of bread. "I don't even know how we got you to bed before you collapsed. Gaius told Arthur you'd come down with the cough. What were you doing?"

"It's no use," he says. "I can't fix this. I can't do anything."

She slides closer on the bench, puts her arm around his shoulders. They sit like that for a long time.

 

 

There's actually very little to do by the time Merlin wanders out of Gaius's room to help with the refugees. The ceaseless drum of the rain makes everyone numb and listless and Merlin hears none of the fighting you would expect from exhausted people in close quarters. In fact, he doesn't hear much talking, either. He finds Gwen in the kitchens, plucking chickens of all things.

"I thought Morgana was going to go crazy, stuck in here with nothing to do," she confides. "I'm almost glad that these people came. I mean, I know that sounds terrible, I just—"

"I know," he cuts in. "We're all sick of just sitting around."

It's good to talk to her; Merlin lost track of the days long ago, but it's been too long since he's seen anyone but Arthur and Gaius and his mother. The bustle of the kitchens makes the wet wood seem far away.

"And what have you been doing?" asks Gwen, almost reading his mind. "It feels like ages since I've seen you."

"Well, you know. Trying to keep Arthur entertained, mostly," he lies. A chicken feather floats up above the table and he tries to snatch it out of midair. She laughs. If it weren't for the persistent sound of the rain, he could almost believe that everything was normal.

Which can't last, of course. Morgana walks in with a basket on each arm and startles at the sight of him — only a tiny bit, but Merlin will take anything he can get. He smiles an apology to Gwen and rushes over to Morgana's side.

"Here, let me carry something." She glares at him. Right, probably not the best opener for Morgana. He's floundering for something else when she changes her mind, dumps both baskets in his arms, and picks up an overlarge stewpot instead with a look that's just daring him to comment. He doesn't.

"Thanks, Merlin," she says eventually. "We're headed to the ballroom, by the way, that's where we're feeding everyone."

"Bad dreams again?" he asks once they're down the hall a bit. She looks over sharply.

"What makes you say that?"

"The way you looked at me when you walked into the kitchens."

"I'm sorry, I—"

"It's not a big deal. This rain would give anyone strange dreams, never mind being stuck inside for weeks on end. What was it about?" He holds his breath. They walk on.

"You know the legend of the Green Man," Morgana finally says. He nods assent even though it wasn't really a question, tries to keep his sigh of relief silent. "That's what I keep dreaming. That it's you."

"Well, that's not so bad," he says. What he thinks is, _hope_. He doesn't know exactly what it means, but that dream sounds like the first glimmer of hope he's had in a long time.

"Not so bad?" echoes Morgana.

"Merlin, the Green Man dies."

  
In the days that come Arthur barely leaves his room, discussions of rebuilding and rationing abandoned in the face of certain starvation. For the first time that Merlin can remember he lets go of the intensity that always draws people to him, or perhaps it just washes away in the path of the rain like everything else. It leaves him quiet, resigned, like the day he asked about growing up in Ealdor, back when they thought this storm could be weathered.

Merlin doesn't have much to occupy his days, either. He fetches their food, tends the fire, stops by to see his mother and Gaius every once in a while. Mostly he stays with Arthur. The room is strangely peaceful with just the two of them, quiet, and the rain. The sound of it muffles the noises of the castle. Too often he descends in the morning and is surprised by the hundreds of people who have moved into Camelot's halls, not so far at all from what feels like the utter isolation of the end of Arthur's bed, his chair, his window onto the drowning world.

"The Green Man dies," he says aloud one day, still pondering it and still not coming up with anything that could help the situation. Arthur responds a touch too slowly, pulling himself out of his own thoughts or maybe just out of the drifting, mindless daze of the rain. When he turns he's wearing his I'm-indulging-your-strangeness smile but the usual insulting edge to it is absent.

"Yes, he gets burned," says Arthur.

"_Burned_?"

"Well, symbolically, at least."

Merlin stares at him.

"Start from the beginning, would you? Are you talking about the planting festival?"

"Mm. Whoever's picked to be the Green Man gets dressed up in, I don't know, vines and things, ram's horns, the whole bit, and then has to dance around the fields to bless them. Afterward they make a bonfire and throw in the horns, which is symbolically burning the Green Man. Right? I don't know, I'm the wrong person to ask about this. I've never been to the festival."

"Uther," says Merlin in sudden understanding. It's too familiar, using the king's name to Arthur's face, but so many days watching the rain together is eroding what formality they still had, shortening the distance between them until it is close to what Merlin had imagined that first day, offering his hand and his name to a stranger. Arthur doesn't even blink an eye.

"I tried to sneak out a few times, but I think he put the guards on special alert. The punishment was always worse on those days, too."

It seems obvious now, but Merlin hadn't realized that Uther was not only against magic but also against — they call it the Old Religion, here. Probably Uther's doing as well, another thing he hadn't thought about. It makes sense, Old Religion to make it seem outdated, unimportant. He wonders if Old Religion implies that there will be a New Religion, doesn't know what he thinks about that.

"How did you learn about the festival, then?" he asks.

"Morgana. I asked her as soon as she got here, before anyone told her not to speak of such things."

Merlin can imagine that perfectly, Arthur sneaking out of his rooms to talk with her, Morgana unable to resist showing off her superior knowledge, keeping him hanging on her every word. The beginning of what you could probably call a friendship, provided neither of the concerned parties were within earshot.

"Did you go?" Arthur asks. "To the festival, in Ealdor?"

"Everyone went. The traditions are a bit different, though. The Green Man isn't a person, we make him out of food, the best we have left. Imagine a scarecrow, only edible."

"And then you eat him?"

Merlin can't help but laugh at that, at the expression on Arthur's face. "No, no. When the ceremony's over we bury him in one of the fields, a different one every year because that field always has the best yield in the next harvest."

There are other parts of the celebration, but Merlin isn't going to mention them if Arthur isn't. He has a feeling that Morgana probably left a few things out of her stories.

"Oh, right," says Arthur. "I'd forgotten that part. They do the same thing here, leave the ashes of the bonfire in the field. It's supposed to bring prosperity or something."

It occurs to him very suddenly that none of this actually means anything to Arthur — and no wonder, if it was nothing more than a forbidden story to him growing up. It's not that Merlin believes that a patchwork plant man with dried peas for eyes is a god, but he does believe that it means something. He believes that it is important, that it is _necessary_ to give back some of what they have taken, another way (like Nimueh, he thinks and tries not to) of preserving the balance of nature.

He wonders if the dragon knows that Arthur does not believe in the forces that saved his life.

 

Merlin has strange dreams that night. He is outside but the rain does not touch him because he has no body, no form, is nothing but thoughts and sound drifting slowly over the ruined fields. He is far from the castle but he knows he is in Camelot without knowing how he knows. He dreams that the soil glows green and gold, knows that he is seeing the life within it, life ready to be soaked into a plant, ready to travel from animal to animal. He dreams of watching the glow slowly wash away, watching it dim and disappear in the flooding rivers.

"Merlin," says a voice he always listens to and he opens his eyes to Arthur leaning over the side of the bed, looking down at his pallet. In the moment of waking Merlin sees a halo of light around his head, strange and impossible because no one has seen the sun in what feels like longer than he can remember.

"Are you awake?" says Arthur.

"Yes," says Merlin. Arthur looks at him for a long moment before sighing and flopping back down out of sight.

"Oh, good," he says. "I'm hungry."

It keeps raining.

 

Days pass in a slow blur. More people arrive looking for asylum. Gaius invents a nasty-smelling cough suppressant. Arthur asks Merlin to tell him about other peasant traditions, things Morgana wouldn't have known. Merlin whispers magic to dry the firewood while Arthur is sleeping. He makes the bed. He listens to the rain. He fetches lunch.

He comes back with a worryingly light tray —they've started rationing now, only delaying the inevitable — to find Arthur with his chair facing into the room, watching the fire. That in and of itself is different. He spends a great deal of time staring out at the rain, seemingly as mesmerized by the sight of it as Merlin is by the sound, but today the window is open behind his back and he pays it no mind.

"Arthur?"

He doesn't look away from the fire but he does start to say something, several times, and then stops. Merlin puts the tray down and leans against the table, watching. Eventually Arthur says,

"What was Will to you, exactly?"

The rain dulls emotions, makes everything seem distant and unimportant, but Merlin manages a flash of anger.

"He was more than a metaphor. If you have a question, ask it plainly."

There was a tree by a river with their names carved side by side on one of its branches. It's almost certainly gone now, washed away in the flood that is the price of Arthur's life. Sometimes he wonders how much higher that price could possibly be.

Arthur meets his eyes, then, and the rain fills another long pause.

"Will you come to bed with me?" Arthur asks, finally.

"I will," says Merlin. It sounds strangely formal, but that's what's left when you bite back words like _of course_.

They don't move for a moment, caught between the words they have spoken and the food waiting on the table, the expectation of a normal day. Merlin breaks it with a step forward and then Arthur is out of his chair, two measured strides to cross the distance and kissing him, surer than his words.

When they tumble to the bed Merlin takes care to land on top. Rain on the windows already conjures a specific memory and he's afraid that if there are blue eyes above him he won't be able to remember whose they aren't.

 

Later, some amount of days later that is impossible to count, a knock startles them awake. It probably shouldn't, but then there's no real reason to rise early anymore. Arthur looks at Merlin. Merlin looks back at Arthur. His eyes are barely open and his hair is a mess and Merlin thinks over the list of things he'd like to do right now and doesn't find discretion anywhere on it.

The knock comes again. Merlin relents, rolling out of Arthur's bed and down onto the pallet he hasn't been using, and Arthur drags himself over to open the door.

"Good morning, sire," someone says, reminding Merlin how long it's been since he used the word. "The king wishes to speak with you."

What Uther wants, as it turns out, is for Arthur to lead the knights on hunting expeditions. He goes, of course, because they are trying to feed entire villages of people and because it is finally something useful that he can do and because his father asks it of him. Merlin hates it. He resents the interruption of their peaceful world and more than that, he hates what it does to Arthur.

Arthur who comes back from every expedition soaked to the bone and shivering, each time with his head bowed lower under the exhaustion and despair, whether or not he's been successful. Merlin can't say a word. He can't say that he knows what it's like out there, that he understands. All he can do is gentle his hands as he redresses Arthur in dry clothes and raise his voice over the sound of the rain.

 

The hunting is useful, though, and there are rumors about venison floating down the line where Merlin is waiting for their dinner. It's taking longer than usual, perhaps because a new group of refugees has arrived and needs everything explained. He shifts his tray from hand to hand, tries to separate sounds from the constant murmur of rain. Rattling dishes, someone sneezing, quiet conversations.

"It was awful," a woman is saying behind him. "Our cemetery is next to a little pond, only the pond overflowed and the water just wore away and wore away until all the dirt was gone and you could see the faces of the dead. The butcher's grandfather floated right up to his front door. That was the last straw, let me tell you."

Intrigued despite himself, Merlin turns, turns and looks into the face of a girl he saved from drowning thirteen years ago.

"Anna?" he says, and she interrupts herself mid-sentence to hug him.

"When did you get here? How are things in Ealdor?" he asks when she lets go.

She shakes her head. "I don't know, Merlin. I left just after you did. Married, can you believe it? My husband's around here somewhere, trying to find us a place to sleep."

"Don't be silly, you can stay with us," he says. He probably should have asked Gaius before he offered, but oh, well. It's done now. "Why don't you come to dinner with us tonight? My mother's here as well, you know. She'll have a million questions for you."

"Hunith?"

"Yeah, she was, um, visiting when the rain started and then there was no sense in trying to get back home." He digs around in his pocket, produces the chits that allow him food for two people. "Here, would you take these? I'll go run and let them know you're coming. Just wait for me by the door there."

It's a breathless few minutes — to Gaius's rooms to tell them the news, then up to Arthur to explain why he won't be eating there, back to the ballroom to find a servant who will carry Arthur's food up to him, and then leading the way to Gaius's again — but soon enough everyone settles into greetings and introductions. Anna clings to Hunith as her husband thanks Gaius for his hospitality. He seems like a good man, but Merlin eyes him up anyway, an unspeakably, painfully inadequate apology for the space where Will should be.

They make small talk, skirting around too many topics. Hunith asks about new married life, Gaius about their journey to Camelot, Anna about Gaius's work. "And you, Merlin? What do you do here?" puts in the husband. Merlin's mother shoots him a warning look, though it's unnecessary. He can see Anna's sudden tension as clearly as anyone else.

"I work for the royal family," is all he says, and lets his mother change the subject.

She asks for news of Ealdor. They don't have any, haven't heard a word since the storm started.

"Of course, no one could be expected to carry news or letters in this weather," says Anna without very much conviction. "I was hoping to find my family here. You haven't seen anyone else?"

"None but the three of us," says Hunith. They are all subdued after that; Ealdor is built on low ground.

Merlin excuses himself eventually, citing his duties. Anna walks with him out into the hall and then stops.

"Merlin," she says. He stops, too, and turns. She is standing straight, looking him in the eye.

"Will wasn't a sorcerer," she says.

He thinks of unseen hands lifting her out of the river, wonders if she remembers, wonders if there was even a reason to save her then only to drown her more slowly now in an endless, deathly rain.

"No," he says. "He wasn't."

They stand there for a long time, but she doesn't speak again.

When he gets back Arthur is toying with the remnants of his dinner, waiting.

"How was it?" he asks. Merlin thinks of all the ways he could answer: my entire village is probably dead. Anna won't even say your name. He thinks: Will is gone.

He says:

"Did you know that when the flood waters run over a cemetery they wash away the soil so you can see the corpses?"

"That's dis_gus_ting," says Arthur, making a face halfway between horror and fascination. The sheer normalcy of it makes something swell in Merlin's chest and he laughs because he doesn't know any other way to let it out.

  
"What if it never stops raining?"

Arthur is back from another hunt, mostly dry except for his hair. He sits naked on the edge of his bed and stares out at the rain. Merlin turns from where he's getting new clothes out of the wardrobe. There's something bleak in Arthur's eyes, something exhausted and distant. Every time he returns it takes longer to focus him back inside.

Merlin puts the clothes down, walks over and pushes gently at Arthur's shoulders until he lays back on the bed and then climbs on top of him.

"Say that again?" he murmurs, quiet, sliding under the sound of the rain instead of through it.

"What if it never stops raining?"

"What if it never stops raining?" Merlin repeats. The dim light from the window makes shadow droplets on Arthur's skin and he chases them as he speaks, trying to press his lips to every one before it moves.

"What if it never stops raining?" he says to Arthur's chest, his chin, his temple.

"What if we can't ever leave? If there are no more duties. No responsibility. If we have to stay here, in the castle, in this room. What if this is the end of the world and it can't be stopped and we can't do anything at all but stay, just being here, the two of us?"

"I would hate that," whispers Arthur with no conviction at all.

Merlin chases a raindrop over his jaw and down the line of his shoulder.

"I would hate that," Arthur says again, suddenly intense, like he's angry that it isn't true. He rolls them with almost no effort, lands with a hand cradling Merlin's face, grinds down.

"I would hate that," he says, "_Merlin_."

"Arthur," he agrees, looking up into blue eyes. The name comes easily to his lips, no confusion at all, and that maybe breaks his heart just a little.

 

More time passes. Merlin jolts awake one night, heart pounding, feeling it down to his bones.

"Arthur, wake up," he hisses. It sounds loud in the silence.

 

 

They half-run through the castle, stumbling in the dark and not caring, until they can spill out onto the high turret of a guard tower long unused. Every sound seems amplified, from their footsteps to their breath to the way Arthur laughs and laughs, face turned to the sky.

There's no question of going back inside. In the end they lie shoulder to shoulder on the cold, wet stone, watching the clouds begin to break apart in the wind. It feels like a great weight has been lifted from Merlin's chest, one he didn't even notice was there. He hasn't done magic in weeks, he thinks, not since the storm battered that part of him almost into nothingness, the lack of it so muted and muffled and confused in the sound of the rain that he barely noticed the loss. Now, though, there is magic surging alive and full of possibility under his skin and he has to let out a laugh of his own because it's all so _clear_. There is gold and green behind his eyes. He knows how to do it, he can wave his hand, he can lie himself down like Morgana's Green Man and bring life back into the earth. This is how we are going to begin, he thinks. He feels so light he could float away on the wind.

"Arthur," he says, reaching out to join their hands. His voice carries. He takes a deep breath.

"Arthur," he says, "I can fix this."

Above them, a cloud drifts into wisps and behind it there are stars.

~~

The legend of the Green Man endures long into the centuries of change that come. Even when the details begin to shift and fade, there is a group of villages that cling to their particular version of the tale. They speak of a great flood- another of the oldest myths- and of the Green Man following in its wake, restoring the world to life.

They say that he could have been a martyr, could have taken everything within himself and poured it into the earth until there was none left to sustain his body, but he did not. He did not give his life; he shared it, and this was a greater sacrifice. He bound his very soul to the land to revive it and so he will never die, never truly rest, only wax and wane as the seasons do, forever called to return and wander the earth in its every hour of need.

In the villages that tell this tale there is still a festival to celebrate the first planting. Every year a youth is chosen to be the Green Man, and while his friends laugh and sing and eat what good food has been saved through the winter he must dance the whole night without a pause, in remembrance.

There is also another part played in this festival, one not found in other villages. He is the Golden Man, and he is the only one who may touch the Green Man, who may bring him food and drink and take his weight when he stumbles, whose duty it is to lead his friend away to rest his legs when the sun finally rises over the thinning crowd.

Later in the morning the villagers will rouse themselves, grumbling at the sunlight and the ale they drank the night before. Together they will begin the planting. Everyone will help, young and old, save two who are never disturbed, for the field where they sleep is said to be blessed in the coming year.

**Author's Note:**

> ETA: gorgeous, awesome art for this story by yue-ix can be found here: http://yue-ix.livejournal.com/124857.html


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